The Kansas City Business Journal caught up with David Cooper, president of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Kansas City Homes, to ask about what trends he sees in residential real estate.

Your industry was clearly affected by the recession. What trends are you seeing now?

Definitely the market has come back. A lot has to do with low interest rates, pent-up demand, and now we’re seeing a supply shortage of listings. Last year was very robust, and listings that had been on the market sold because there was a pent-up demand.

We’re definitely in the spring market already. We are seeing many listings with multiple offers, as many as eight, and in one instance I know of, there were 12. So that becomes a bidding war, which is a good thing for the seller. No question about it. Which is great, but it also indicates that we need more listings.

So what has come out of the trench, if you will, or the downturn — (the) new homes market has totally come back. New home sales are much greater than they were three years ago.

Some good sales in the high-end last year — our company is predominantly in the high-end market, so we were very glad to see that.

And it’s great to see — and this is kind of a two-fold thing that doesn’t affect the consumer — but the millennials are getting into buying homes, but they are also getting into the market to be an agent. So that’s kind of a side note, but we haven’t seen that for a while because with the market being bad, you know, (people say) “I don’t want to get into real estate sales because sales are bad.” So consequently, it’s nice to see millennials getting in the market to buy but also to consider it as a career.

Are more people getting into the business now or are trying to get out?

No, they’re not trying to get out. We have an aging population of agents within the city, as does every other city, because I think the average real estate agent age is somewhere around 50, 55.

We have recruited more new agents and total agents in first part of this year versus last year.

So, to answer your question, yes, the increase of people getting into the business is there.

What’s your prediction for this year?

From everybody I’ve listened to, both locally and nationally, I think it’s going to be very similar to last year but maybe a little flat. In our city, many people would say it was very robust. We had our record year. I don’t think that was the same way in other markets nationally because they had more to come back from. In Kansas City, we’ve got a fairly steady market. We don’t really have high ups and downs. So the prediction for this year is to be good, similar to last year, certainly not flat, but a decent year.